• Welcome to League Of Reason Forums! Please read the rules before posting.
    If you are willing and able please consider making a donation to help with site overheads.
    Donations can be made via here

Life depends on matter, energy, and information

arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
But religion can never be honest if they do there view collapse.

As I imagine is pretty clear... I am not a religious person. ;) But I'd like to imagine there is a way to be both religious and honest, that they don't necessarily have to be exclusive. I've had the fortune to know people who are religious and - as far as I can tell - honest with themselves about it. We're often vacuously mantra'd at by the overtly religious about how there can be no morality absent religion, that God is truth, etc., and those people seem to me to be the ones most likely to engage in self-deceit, and perhaps they need to harangue others to make themselves feel better, perhaps to chase away their niggling doubts by shouting the inner questions down. But while I see no reason why sincere belief couldn't induce honest reflection and self-awareness; I'm just not sure whether absolute honesty, a desire for the hard truth, and a genuine appraisal of the world in which the self resides can ever lead to religion.
 
arg-fallbackName="rationalist"/>
The fabled scientific consensus does not regard the term "Operational science" or the creationist understanding of "Historical science" as valid scientific terminology, and these heresies primarily appear in arguments presented by creationists about whether ideas such as Big Bang, geologic timeline, abiogenesis, evolution and nebular hypothesis Wikipedia are really scientific. As Bill Nye pointed out when debating Ken Ham, even Ken Ham admits that the distinction is entirely a creationist invention, and no scientist not on the Answers in Genesis (AiG) payroll agrees with him about it.

Because you are trying to misrepresent science.
Methodological naturalism is the framework upon which operational science performs empirical tests and attempts to elucidate and explain how natural things work and operate. Historical science asks a different question, namely how things occurred in the past. Historical science draws its data from records of past events, as opposed to "experimental" or "operational" science. It uses the knowledge that is already currently known to tell the story of what happened in the past. While it is justified to limit possible explanations related to operational science to methodological naturalism, since things operate in nature without supernatural intervention, in regards of origins, there is no justification to limit the possible explanations only to natural ones. While random, unguided natural events is a possible explanation of origins, so is intelligent design.

Either the physical universe and all in it emerged by a lucky accident, spontaneously through self-organization by unguided natural events in an orderly manner without external direction, purely physicodynamic processes and reactions, or through the direct intervention and creative force of an intelligent agency, a powerful creator. Excluding a priori, one possible explanation leads undoubtedly to bad inferences and bad science.

When we see a bicycle, and never saw one before: the question: How does it work, and what is its function? will give us entirely different answers, then: What made the bicycle and how was it made?

Intelligence is a known reality and therefore it is entirely legitimate for science to consider it among the possible causal factors in a given phenomenon coming about. Intelligent agency is currently the only causally adequate explanation for the machinery by which the cell translates DNA code having its assembly instructions also coded in the DNA.

Cleland: Historical science, experimental science, and the scientific method 2001
Many scientists believe that there is a uniform, interdisciplinary method for the practice of good science. The paradigmatic examples, however, are drawn from classical experimental science. Insofar as historical hypotheses cannot be tested in controlled laboratory settings, historical research is sometimes said to be inferior to experimental research. Using examples from diverse historical disciplines, this paper demonstrates that such claims are misguided.First, the reputed superiority of experimental research is based upon accounts of scientific methodology (Baconian inductivism or falsificationism) that are deeply flawed, both logically and as accounts of the actual practices of scientists. Second, although there are fundamental differences in methodology between experimental scientists and historical scientists, they are keyed to a pervasive feature of nature, a time asymmetry of causation. As a consequence, the claim that historical science is methodologically inferior to experimental science cannot be sustained.
https://sci-hub.ren/https://pubs.ge...storical-science-experimental-science-and-the

"Historical science" is a term used to describe sciences in which data is provided primarily from past events and for which there is usually no direct experimental data, such as cosmology, astronomy, astrophysics, geology, paleontology, and archaeology. "Historical science" covers the Big Bang, geologic timeline, abiogenesis, evolution, and nebular hypothesis
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Historical_and_operational_science

International Committee of Historical Sciences
The International Committee of Historical Sciences / Comité international des Sciences historiques (ICHS / CISH) is the international association of historical scholarship. It was established as a non-governmental organization in Geneva on May 14, 1926. It is composed of national committees and international affiliated organizations devoted to research and to scholarly publication in all areas of historical study. There are currently 51 national committees and 30 international associations members of the CISH.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_of_Historical_Sciences

The first difference is that historical study is a matter of probability. Any and all historical theories are supported by evidence that is not deductive in nature. We might consider them to be inferences to the best explanation, or Bayesian probabilities but they cannot be deductions. historical theories are not based on experiments, – repeatable or otherwise – nor are historical theories subject to empirical verification. The evidence for a historical theory may be empirical, but the theory itself is not. These differences mean that one cannot simply treat science and history as similar disciplines.
http://simplyphilosophy.org/methodological-naturalism-science-and-history/

Historical science, experimental science, and the scientific method
Historical research is sometimes said to be inferior to experimental research. Using examples from diverse historical disciplines, this paper demonstrates that such claims are misguided.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/81ca/78baf41581a70ddf0af3115ea8255aace4fb.pdf
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Evangelizing internet Creationists don't actually do science - they just emote at the figment of their imagination, a simplistic parody of science. Thus they don't realize that all the physical sciences necessarily employ experimentation in the NOW with results occurring NOW and amenable to being reproducible NOW meaning they are wholly subject to falsification and verification, just as all sciences necessarily employ data collected in the PAST from PAST states if for nothing else than for inductive hypothesis formation.

It's a bullshit distinction conceived in error, and ironically indicative only of scientific ignorance.
 
arg-fallbackName="rationalist"/>
Life depends on the structural complex arrangement using

- matter
- energy
- information


Prove that.
Bet you can't.
Well, yeah. Actually, i can.

How Structure Arose in the Primordial Soup
About 4 billion years ago, molecules began to make copies of themselves, an event that marked the beginning of life on Earth. A few hundred million years later, primitive organisms began to split into the different branches that make up the tree of life. In between those two seminal events, some of the greatest innovations in existence emerged: the cell, the genetic code and an energy system to fuel it all. ALL THREE of these are ESSENTIAL to life as we know it, yet scientists know disappointingly little about how any of these remarkable biological innovations came about.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-structure-arose-in-the-primordial-soup/
 
arg-fallbackName="rationalist"/>
Evangelizing internet Creationists don't actually do science - they just emote at the figment of their imagination, a simplistic parody of science. Thus they don't realize that all the physical sciences necessarily employ experimentation in the NOW with results occurring NOW and amenable to being reproducible NOW meaning they are wholly subject to falsification and verification, just as all sciences necessarily employ data collected in the PAST from PAST states if for nothing else than for inductive hypothesis formation.

It's a bullshit distinction conceived in error, and ironically indicative only of scientific ignorance.
Its the experimental science which gives support to intelligent design.

The idea of abiogenesis should have long ago been rejected.
Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic? August 2018
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798
…the dominant biological paradigm — abiogenesis in a primordial soup. The latter idea was developed at a time when the earliest living cells were considered to be exceedingly simple structures that could subsequently evolve in a Darwinian way. These ideas should of course have been critically examined and rejected after the discovery of the exceedingly complex molecular structures involved in proteins and in DNA. But this did not happen. Modern ideas of abiogenesis in hydrothermal vents or elsewhere on the primitive Earth have developed into sophisticated conjectures with little or no evidential support. …independent abiogenesis on the cosmologically diminutive scale of oceans, lakes or hydrothermal vents remains a hypothesis with no empirical support…The conditions that would most likely to have prevailed near the impact-riddled Earth’s surface 4.1–4.23 billion years ago were too hot even for simple organic molecules to survive let alone evolve into living complexity. The requirement now, on the basis of orthodox abiogenic thinking, is that an essentially instantaneous transformation of non-living organic matter to bacterial life occurs, an assumption we consider strains credibility of Earth-bound abiogenesis beyond the limit. The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions, an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle. All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure.

Emergence of life in an inflationary universe
03 February 2020
In spite of recent rapid development of biology, chemistry, Earth science and astronomy, the origin of life (abiogenesis) is still a great mystery in science. Abiotic emergence of ordered information stored in the form of RNA is an important unresolved problem concerning the origin of life. A polymer longer than 40–100 nucleotides is necessary to expect a self-replicating activity, but the formation of such a long polymer having a correct nucleotide sequence by random reactions seems statistically unlikely. lmin must be shorter than ~20 nucleotides for the abiogenesis probability close to unity on a terrestrial planet, but a self-replicating activity is not expected for such a short RNA. A fundamental and unsolved problem is how an RNA polymer long enough to have a self-replicating RNA polymerase activity (i.e., RNA replicase ribozyme) emerged from prebiotic conditions and then triggered Darwinian evolution. RNA molecules shorter than 25 nucleotides (nt) do not show a specified function. Formation of just a single long strand may not be sufficient to initiate an abiogenesis event. Instead a pair of identical strands may be necessary if one serves as a replicase ribozyme and the other as a template. Polymerization of RNA in water is a thermodynamically uphill process, and hence reacting monomers need to be activated. Some experiments yielded production of up to 40-mers of RNA, which may be long enough to have some biological activities. However, these results have not been reproducible, and only short oligomers of up to 10-mers were produced conclusively in recent experiments, with the abundance rapidly decreasing with the oligomer length. This trend is also consistent with the theoretical expectation for random adding of monomers. An experimental difficulty is that aggregates may easily be mistaken for polymers, depending on detection methods. A report of experimental production of long polymers (>120 nt) by ligation has been subject to reproducibility and the aggregate/polymer discrimination problem. A high concentration of oligomers is necessary for ligation to work efficiently, but this may be difficult because oligomer abundance rapidly decreases with oligomer length in polymerization by monomers, even if such a ligase activity exists. If we consider only the conservative abiotic polymerization, i.e., statistically adding monomers, the probability of abiogenesis may be extremely low on a terrestrial planet. Most part of the universe inflates forever, self-reproducing many subregions that undergo a conventional inflation followed by a hot big-bang universe. Then an infinite number of stars and galaxies would be formed, and we expect emergence of life even if the abiogenesis probability is infinitely small. The result of this work may also give an explanation for the homochirality of life. Even if activated monomers supplied to the polymerization cycle are a racemic mixture, life emerging from them would be homochiral, if homochirality is a necessary requirement for an RNA polymer to show biological activities. Simply it needs more time or volume for a homochiral polymer to be assembled by random polymerization, with Nnb twice as large as when ignoring chirality. On the other hand, the expected number of abiogenesis events is much smaller than unity when we observe a star, a galaxy, or even the whole observable universe. This gives an explanation to the Fermi’s paradox. The observable universe is just a tiny part, whose volume is likely smaller than 1∕1078 of the whole universe created by an inflation, and there is no strong reason to expect more than one abiogenesis event in such a small region. Even if Earth is the only planet that harbors life inside the observable universe, it does not contradict the Copernican principle, because life would have emerged on countless planets in the whole inflationary universe in which we exist. The probability of finding biosignatures from planets or satellites in the Solar System or from exoplanets is negligibly small. A theoretically intriguing question is whether a chemical RNA-like long polymer is easily formed to contain information and show biological activities eventually leading to higher organisms, when physical laws are arbitrarily made, e.g., by random choices of fundamental physical constants. Perhaps this may be the ultimate mystery regarding the origin of life, which is, of course, far beyond the scope of this work.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41...45_deeplink_PID100052172&utm_content=deeplink
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Its the experimental science which gives support to intelligent design.

There's no distinction at all, so regardless of what you've continued on to write, your founding postulate is irrevocably flawed - so tell me why I am supposed to read yet another copy & paste diatribe when it's just more specious crap?

And seriously, for fuck's sakes man - Intelligent Design doesn't fucking do science. You might be able to circle-jerk with other Creationists about how it's a science, but everyone here knows that I.D. is purely religious and expressly anti-science, so the idea that 'experimental science' offers any support to I.D. is absurd.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Oooh statistically unlikely! That's one of the core themes of Creationist attacks on science. Unsurprisingly, it's just as devoid of understanding the mathematics of probability as it is of biological science; thoroughly confounded by ignorant arrogance. Statistically unlikely things happen literally all the time.

One of the metaphors people employ to talk about outside chances is 'it's like winning the lottery' - in an example lottery where the player chooses 6 numbers ranging from 1 to 49, the chances of selecting all the correct numbers (in any order) is 1 in 13,983,816. Wow! How can anyone ever beat those odds, amirite? The should never be a winner of the lottery!

Well, that's how Creationists SHOULD consider it because of the foundational flaws in the way they consider problems in the world.

Creationists uncritically engage in a serial trials fallacy, imagining the chances of occurring from a single iteration where, analogously, there is only one player buying one ticket per round. In reality, of course, there's not just one player and not just one ticket bought, so while the chances of any single ticket winning is 1 in 13,983,816, the chances of there being a winner is entirely different and much greater when there are tens of millions of players buying hundreds of millions of tickets.

When Creationists start yammering about the statistical chances of abiogenesis occurring, they're operating under the same flawed conceit - a single instance: try, fail, reset - a series of independent events with a single highly unlikely outcome. In reality, of course, in a pool of chemicals, there could be billions of chemical interactions occurring every millisecond repeatedly over whatever selected period of time.

Do they try and calculate this complex statistical problem? Do they fuck! That would mean having to do some work rather than yammering at people on the internet! A motivation which was genuinely interested in truth should drive people who want to make claims like this, but Creationists aren't in the slightest bit motivated by seeking truth - their motivations are purely to achieve supremacy of their ideas, and modern Creationism laughably seeks to achieve this not by showing that Creationism is actually superior, but by attempting to undermine scientific knowledge as if by taking it down their ideas would be the only remaining game in town. It's bullshit top to bottom, and it's why people laugh at Creationism.
 
Last edited:
arg-fallbackName="HereticSin"/>
Well, yeah. Actually, i can.

How Structure Arose in the Primordial Soup
About 4 billion years ago, molecules began to make copies of themselves, an event that marked the beginning of life on Earth. A few hundred million years later, primitive organisms began to split into the different branches that make up the tree of life. In between those two seminal events, some of the greatest innovations in existence emerged: the cell, the genetic code and an energy system to fuel it all. ALL THREE of these are ESSENTIAL to life as we know it, yet scientists know disappointingly little about how any of these remarkable biological innovations came about.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-structure-arose-in-the-primordial-soup/
"Life AS WE KNOW IT". FAIL.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Today it rained a little. It's quite unusual at this time of year here. I was struck on the forehead by a raindrop.

Now what is the fucking chance of that particular raindrop falling 2500 feet from the fucking sky only to land on MY forehead? Considering the size of the Earth's surface, the diameter of the raindrop, and the surface area of my forehead, the chances must be astronomical, nigh on impossible... so it can't have happened. Simple as that.

I must have been mistaken; there's no other plausible explanation.


Amirite?
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
I'd like to think that God lovingly directed that rain drop, that part of the ineffable plan, perhaps even the entire reason for it all, was solely to have that raindrop tenderly squelch upon my brow. I'd like to think that, so that's now fact. Stoopid unbelieving heathens - you don't even see miracles when they smack you wetly in the face!
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Repent and embrace the Jesus, and one day a rain drop may fall on your forehead too.
 
arg-fallbackName="*SD*"/>
If I came back with a powerful and well reasoned rebuttal such as "you're smelly" I would still be in with a shout though, right?!
 
arg-fallbackName="rationalist"/>
Oooh statistically unlikely! That's one of the core themes of Creationist attacks on science. Unsurprisingly, it's just as devoid of understanding the mathematics of probability as it is of biological science; thoroughly confounded by ignorant arrogance. Statistically unlikely things happen literally all the time.

One of the metaphors people employ to talk about outside chances is 'it's like winning the lottery' - in an example lottery where the player chooses 6 numbers ranging from 1 to 49, the chances of selecting all the correct numbers (in any order) is 1 in 13,983,816. Wow! How can anyone ever beat those odds, amirite? The should never be a winner of the lottery!

Well, that's how Creationists SHOULD consider it because of the foundational flaws in the way they consider problems in the world.

Creationists uncritically engage in a serial trials fallacy, imagining the chances of occurring from a single iteration where, analogously, there is only one player buying one ticket per round. In reality, of course, there's not just one player and not just one ticket bought, so while the chances of any single ticket winning is 1 in 13,983,816, the chances of there being a winner is entirely different and much greater when there are tens of millions of players buying hundreds of millions of tickets.

When Creationists start yammering about the statistical chances of abiogenesis occurring, they're operating under the same flawed conceit - a single instance: try, fail, reset - a series of independent events with a single highly unlikely outcome. In reality, of course, in a pool of chemicals, there could be billions of chemical interactions occurring every millisecond repeatedly over whatever selected period of time.

Do they try and calculate this complex statistical problem? Do they fuck! That would mean having to do some work rather than yammering at people on the internet! A motivation which was genuinely interested in truth should drive people who want to make claims like this, but Creationists aren't in the slightest bit motivated by seeking truth - their motivations are purely to achieve supremacy of their ideas, and modern Creationism laughably seeks to achieve this not by showing that Creationism is actually superior, but by attempting to undermine scientific knowledge as if by taking it down their ideas would be the only remaining game in town. It's bullshit top to bottom, and it's why people laugh at Creationism.
We do not attack science. We attack materialism because it does not withstand scrutiny. A cake needs a receipt and the right ingredients and a stove ( energy). Cells require a receipt stored in DNA and the right building blocks and energy in the form of ATP. Making the receipt, and selecting the ingredients, and generating energy requires always intelligence.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
We do not attack science. We attack materialism because it does not withstand scrutiny. A cake needs a receipt and the right ingredients and a stove ( energy). Cells require a receipt stored in DNA and the right building blocks and energy in the form of ATP. Making the receipt, and selecting the ingredients, and generating energy requires always intelligence.


Modern day evangelical Christian Creationism is SOLELY an attack on science; there's nothing else to it.

No arguments FOR creationism or theism are offered, no testable hypotheses are presented, no philosophy or logic is conducted - all Creationism's postulates are uncritically assumed and have to be taken on faith, while the working methodology is to attempt to undermine science's legitimacy to gull poorly educated people into the shallow conceit that if science is wrong, then the only remaining idea is Creationism. That's why Creationists don't publish Creationist arguments in credible science journals - not because 'help, help... I'm being oppressed" but because Creationist proponents don't actually offer any new insights, any new science, and certainly don't have any fucking evidence to support their contentions.

And do stop lying. I've already cited the Discovery Institute's leaked Wedge Strategy document that clearly spells out what the I.D. movement's motives and methods are and the highest agenda on the list is to attack, undermine and somehow (irrationally and illiterately) defeat scientific methodology (despite its obvious success) in order to make room for a little more Yahweh in our lives. Don't lie to me Jireh - your name is a watchword for bullshit on the internet, and I will call you out every fucking time.
 
arg-fallbackName="We are Borg"/>
and I will call you out every fucking time.

To be fair if science makes a mistake they will be called out to. Like Aron says Bull Shit will not fly. For me i rather eat Crow then to have it wrong all the time.
 
Back
Top